The District of Columbia took a defiant step in its attempt to legalize marijuana. The City Council chairman sent the ballot measure approving pot legalization to Congress for legislative review, despite Republicans passing a law to prevent such an act.

Washington, DC residents approved
the legalization of small amounts of recreational marijuana
for personal use in the November 2014 election. Initiative
71 passed with 70 percent voter approval. Retail sales of pot
are still outlawed under the measure. In December, with the
federal government on the verge of another shutdown, Republicans
muscled through a $1.1 trillion, 900-page government spending
bill that included a paragraph stating the city cannot use any
funding ‒ federal or local ‒ to enact laws regarding reduction of
drug-possession penalties in the District.

“The marijuana compromise that Republicans and Democrats
reached is that D.C’s decriminalization law and Initiative 71 can
move forward, but D.C. cannot enact further changes, such as
taxing and regulating marijuana to eliminate the illicit
market,” Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the
Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement at the time.

DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) “took the provocative
step of sending the marijuana measure” to the Republican-led
Congress on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported. The
legislative branch will have 30 days to review the bill, in
accordance with the 1973 Home Rule Act. If Congress does not act
to block the approved ballot initiative ‒ which President Barack
Obama would then have to sign ‒ the law permitting possession of
up to two ounces and home cultivation of pot could become law in
the District as early as March.

Congress has only rebuffed a DC law during the 30-day review
period three times in 40 years, the Post reported.

Advocates for the measure believe they have found a
loophole in the wording of the spending bill. The part of the
federal legislation that targeted marijuana legalization in DC
stated that funding cannot be used to “enact” - not to
“enact or carry out” - laws regarding reduction of
drug-possession penalties in the District.

“The District’s examination agrees with our analysis that the
initiative was enacted when voters approved it and will take
effect at the end of the 30-day congressional review
period," DC's non-voting representative in the House, Del.
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), said in a statement.

Under DC law, ballot measures are considered enacted as official
acts ‒ equal to bills passed by the City Council ‒ once election
results are certified. Initiative 71 was certified December 3,
while the so-called “Cromnibus” bill was passed a week
later.

“I have no choice,” Mendelson told the Post. “The
law says that I must transmit the measure. That is all I am
doing.”

Mendelson thinks the initiative will become law if it passes the
congressional review period.

“I happen to believe that the initiative was enacted so I
think there’s no question that after the 30-day review it will be
law,” Mendelson said in a Tuesday phone interview with Roll
Call. He said he would be keeping an eye on Congress after the
initiative is transmitted, as with any ordinary piece of
legislation.

But Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), who
introduced the rider blocking legalization attached to the
spending bill, told reporters in December that a DC bill is not
enacted until it has passed its 30-day congressional review. His
addition "prevents the ultimate enactment of the ballot
initiative," he said, according to Talking Points Memo.

"Congress will have taken a position that the ballot
initiative ‒ legalization, not decriminalization or medical use,
which is allowed under the omnibus language ‒ that going forward,
the legalization effort has to stop. Because no monies can be
expended, either federal monies or district monies," Harris
added.

The third-term congressman further explained his stance in a
statement.

“Despite attempts to misconstrue the language of the omnibus
bill, it is clear that if D.C. chooses to proceed with enactment
of marijuana legalization, they will be in violation of the
law,” Harris said.

Maryland’s only Republican representative also authored a
spending rider to the 2015 Financial Services and General
Government Appropriations bill in June to block
the federal enclave’smarijuana
decriminalization law. The language passed
in the House, but failed in the Senate. Obama had threatened to
veto the bill if it contained the rider.

“We still believe the prohibition on the implementation is
crystal clear in the law,” House Oversight and Government
Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said outside the House
floor Tuesday, according to Roll Call.

“Oh they can send us paperwork,” he said. “That
doesn’t mean that the law’s changed. The law is already in
place.”

When asked if Congress would pass a joint resolution to quash
Initiative 71, Chaffetz replied, “No.”

Advocates are cheering Mendelson’s seeming defiance.

“If Congress does nothing (which they are very good at
doing), the initiative automatically becomes law. The fact that
the burden is on Congress to block it, and not on D.C. to fight
for it, is very significant,” Johnny Green wrote for The
Weed Blog. “I’m confident that things will work out, and that
there will be legal marijuana grown in D.C. this Spring.”

The transmission of the measure, however, could “launch a
rocky year of legal battles ‒ and thrust a final decision on pot
legalization in the city into the hands of federal courts,”
the Post reported.

“I guess we’re in for a legal battle,” Harris told Roll
Call. “I mean, if the DC Council takes an illegal action and
then attempts to do regulation based on illegal action, I guess
that’s the only solution.”

Mendelson sought to downplay the significance of sending the
measure to the Hill, telling the Post it was “nothing
special.” Legislative staffers bundled Initiative 71 in
manila envelopes with 20 other acts passed by the DC Council (not
voters) for congressional review.